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How did you go about studying this?
We’ve worked across a lot of different
paradigms from cognitive neuroscience,
experimental psychology and then into
education and educational technology.
The idea was to get a sense of what might
be going on across these different levels,
using different methodologies and ways of
understanding how difficulties and confusion
might be an important part of the process.
I assume that by using those methods you
can determine when a student is confused?
That’s right. There are different markers,
and we’ve got to be careful about what
those markers might mean. For example,
a student might stop at some point in a
learning process, and that might indicate
that they’ve hit an impasse and are
confused or find something difficult. But,
it could also mean they’ve given up or
become frustrated.
And one of the things that we’ve been
mindful of is trying to figure out what
the differences might look like between
those, so that we can make better
predictions about which of those things
might be happening. So, two students
will experience some sort of difficult
or complex aspect of the learning in
completely different ways based on their
prior knowledge or how confident they are
in the material.
That was one of the tricky things we
found during this research – there is a vast
difference between students in terms of
how they interpret difficulties and what
strategies they use to deal with them.
Assuming they were confused, have you
found anything so far about how this could
be beneficial?
Yes. What seems to be particularly
important is that if students have a
conception of something that might
not necessarily be accurate, often that
conception needs to be undone in some
way before they can build up the correct
conception. And what we’re finding is that
experiencing some sort of disequilibrium
... is often accompanied by a feeling of
confusion.
That means they’re often going through
the process that we would hope that
they would go through, and that they’re
revisiting what they think they know,
undoing that to an extent, so they can
then build up their understanding in a way
that is more accurate.
How can this help teachers in dealing with
students who are facing that situation?
There’s a couple of things. One is that we
need to move away from the idea that
being confused is always a bad thing. Now,
it can easily tip over into frustration and
boredom, so we’ve got to be careful to
make sure we don’t have students who are
continuously confused. But, the important
takeout is that confusion is a critical part
of the learning process in a lot of cases,
particularly when we’re dealing with
complex concepts. So, the first part is to
be aware of that.
The second part is to work on ways to
help students to come up with strategies
so that, if they do feel confused, they
understand that it’s a normal part of the
process, and they are able to develop
strategies to manage that.
You found differences between the ways in
which confident and less confident students
dealt with confusing information. What were
these differences, and how can teachers’
strategies change in light of them?
Confidence is a critical part of all this.
What we find is that students who are
very confident in an area can often be
ov er-confident. And sometimes what that
means is that, if they have a misconception
about something, they don’t necessarily
experience enough of that kind of
disequilibrium I was talking about before.
So, what happens is they don’t dive
deeply enough into the concepts, and
they don’t end up undoing the incorrect
conception they have, because they
don’t experience the impasse that other
students do. They have this “I’m just going
to bowl straight through it” attitude. And
what can happen is the misconception is
reinforced rather than corrected.
At the other end of the scale, we’ve got
students who are very low on confidence.
Often they will hit an impasse and quickly
become confused, and that confusion
will tip over into frustration, boredom and
giving up.
So, you can see that the confidence
level will drive very different approaches.
From a teacher’s perspective, you can
see that you have a situation that most
students might find difficult and get stuck
on, but depending on their confidence
level, they’re going to need different
interventions to help them through it.
The confident student, for example,
probably needs to be slowed down and
asked: “Are you sure you understand this
task enough to be able to stop and revisit
what you think you know?”
Whereas the student who is not very
confident probably needs a little more
scaffolding and help to understand how
they might deal with that sort of confusing
or difficult material.
Were there any other variables that
produced interesting or contrasting results?
Yes, a few interesting things have come
out of the research we’re doing. One is the
hypercorrection effect, which happens
particularly when you’ve got students
who are very confident about something,
but it is incorrect. Something we see a
lot nowadays, with our easy access to
information, is that you can quickly feel like
you understand something very well, when
often it can be a misconception.
If that misconception can be corrected
through feedback or some other
instructional mechanism, the learning is
much more powerful and tends to last
longer. So, with somebody who’s really
confident but wrong, if you can get them
to change their mind about something,
that’s a deep learning experience. We
found that in a number of studies we did.
What’s next for this research topic?
We want to try and understand more
about how the conceptual change process
happens, particularly in digital environments.
As I said before, we’re looking at conceptual
ideas, and they’re often complicated and
involve multiple elements. We want to
understand how people make sense of
these ideas when they’re in these much
more immersive environments.
For example, we’ve got much better
access to video instruction now, given
download speeds and everything else. So
what does it mean if somebody is trying
to understand a complex concept like
something in quantum physics? They’re
watching videos to understand that concept.
How are they processing that? Are they able
to understand it in any useful way, given that
essentially the video is a broadcast, and we
know that broadcasting ideas at people is
not as effective as people actively using the
ideas in a classroom setting?
So, we’re trying to understand the ways
in which we might be able to maximise
the use of these digital environments to
help people develop a more sophisticated
understanding of complex concepts. ■
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